“Oh,” he said as though maybe he hadn’t considered this. “Then you’re stealing it.”
I hugged the book to my chest. “Thank you.” I kissed him. “Thank you.” I kissed him again. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. He set his thumb between his teeth. “You know, I looked into it, and the military hires more math majors than almost any other industry in the country.”
My heart beat so hard, I had to set the book down for fear of ruining the cover. “Oh yeah?”
He nodded. “Turns out statistics is really important to the armed forces. Who knew?”
“Are you saying that you could see yourself enlisting?”
“How many push-ups do I need to be able to do to make it through boot camp?”
“To make it through? Forty-five. To thrive? Seventy.”
“Let’s start with surviving,” he said. He got down on the ground, raising and lowering himself with relative ease. “One, two, three—”
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “That wasn’t quite right. One more time, please?”
He pushed himself back down to the ground with a grunt. “Un. Deux. Trois.”
I pulled him back to his feet and we both laughed until the laughter faded away and we were alone together again.
“If you hear so much as a floorboard creak…” I whispered.
“I’ve been a little brother for seventeen years,” he assured me. “I know all the tricks.”
We kissed like it was the end of the world, and then, after a break for a glass of ice water, like it was the beginning. And during the breaks, it was just us—two normal, eternally grounded teenagers who lived four hundred and eighty miles apart and occasionally stole time together.
After all, wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said that the very essence of romance is uncertainty?
CAN'T GET ENOUGH OF LILY ANDERSON?
DON'T MISS BEN AND TRIXIE'S STORY IN THE COMPANION NOVEL,
the only thing worse than me is you
AVAILABLE NOW!
* 1 *
Ben West spent summer vacation growing a handlebar mustache.
Seriously.
Hovering over his upper lip—possibly glued there—was a bushy monstrosity that shouted, “Look out, senior class, I’m gonna tie some chicks to the train tracks and then go on safari with my good friend Teddy Roosevelt. Bully!”
I blindly swatted at Harper with my comic book, trying to alert her to the fact that there was a mustachioed moron attempting to blend in with the other people entering campus.
“I know I should have made flash cards for the poems that Cline assigned,” she said, elbowing me back hard, both acknowledging that she wasn’t blind and that she hated when I interrupted her monologues about the summer reading list. “But I found Mrs. Bergman’s sociolinguistics syllabus on the U of O website and I’m sure she’ll use the same one here.”
The mustache twitched an attempt at freedom, edging away from West’s ferrety nose as he tried to shove past a group of nervous freshmen. It might have been looking at me and Harper, but its owner was doing everything possible to ignore us, the planter box we were sitting on, and anything else that might have been east of the wrought iron gate.
“So,” Harper continued, louder than necessary considering we were sitting two inches apart, “I thought I’d get a head start. But now I’m afraid that we were supposed to memorize the poems for Cline. He never responded to my emails.”
Pushing my comic aside, I braced my hands against the brick ledge. The mustache was daring me to say something. Harper could hear it, too, as evidenced by her staring up at the sun and muttering, “Or you could, you know, not do this.”
“Hey, West,” I called, ignoring the clucks of protest coming from my left. “I’m pretty sure your milk mustache curdled. Do you need a napkin?”
Ben West lurched to a stop, one foot inside of the gate. Even on the first day of school, he hadn’t managed to find a clean uniform. His polo was a series of baggy wrinkles, half-tucked into a pair of dingy khakis. He turned his head. If the mustache had been able to give me the finger, it would have. Instead, it watched me with its curlicue fists raised on either side of West’s thin mouth.
“Hey, Harper,” he said. He cut his eyes at me and grumbled, “Trixie.”
I leaned back, offering the slowest of slow claps. “Great job, West. You have correctly named us. I, however, may need to change your mantle. Do you prefer Yosemite Sam or Doc Holliday? I definitely think it should be cowboy related.”
“Isn’t it inhumane to make the freshmen walk past you?” he asked me, pushing the ratty brown hair out of his eyes. “Or is it some kind of ritual hazing?”
“Gotta scare them straight.” I gestured to my blond associate. “Besides, I’ve got Harper to soften the blow. It’s like good cop, bad cop.”
“It is nothing like good cop, bad cop. We’re waiting for Meg,” Harper said, flushing under the smattering of freckles across her cheeks as she turned back to the parking lot, undoubtedly trying to escape to the special place in her head where pop quizzes—and student council vice presidents—lived. She removed her headband and then pushed it back in place until she once again looked like Sleeping Beauty in pink glasses and khakis. Whereas I continued to look like I’d slept on my ponytail.
Which I had because it is cruel to start school on a Wednesday.
“Is it heavy?” I asked Ben, waving at his mustache. “Like weight training for your face? Or are you trying to compensate for your narrow shoulders?”
He gave a halfhearted leer at my polo. “I could ask the same thing of your bra.”
My arms flew automatically to cover my chest, but I seemed to be able to conjure only the consonants of the curses I wanted to hurl at him. In his usual show of bad form, West took this as some sort of victory.
“As you were,” he said, jumping back into the line of uniforms on their way to the main building. He passed too close to Kenneth Pollack, who shoved him hard into the main gate, growling, “Watch it, nerd.”
“School for geniuses, Kenneth,” Harper called. “We’re all nerds.”
Kenneth flipped her off absentmindedly as West righted himself and darted past Mike Shepherd into the main building.
“Brute,” Harper said under her breath.
I scuffed the planter box with the heels of my mandatory Mary Janes. “I’m off my game. My brain is still on summer vacation. I totally left myself open to that cheap trick.”
“I was referring to Kenneth, not Ben.” She frowned. “But, yes, you should have known better. Ben’s been using that bra line since fourth grade.”
As a rule, I refused to admit when Harper was right before eight in the morning. It would lead to a full day of her gloating. I hopped off the planter and scooped up my messenger bag, shoving my comic inside.